ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intercultural encounter and its implications for musicology. It then returns to the issues, developing the idea of an intercultural musicology based on situated encounters, exploring what this might mean in terms of analysis, and attempting to set it within the larger context of an emerging relational musicology. All encounters, musical or otherwise, are conditioned by socioeconomic context, by history, by ideology. Slobin's concept of the relational embraces and it is in this sense that the term has been used by such writers as Ingrid Monson, David McDonald and, most recently, Georgina Born. McDonald is concerned with the way Palestinian hip-hop artists construct an identity that is neither Arab nor Jewish but a performative construct embodying elements of both. In the case of Beijing opera, Stock says, there is a well elaborated 'folk' theory, in which certain occurrences of melodic materials are regarded as underlying others.
